Metal detectorist finds Viking Age gold coin that might upend history
Less than 30 minutes’ drive from Cambridge University, a metal detector followed beeps to a remarkable treasure: a 9th-century gold coin pendant.
It is now no longer uncommon to find long-lost coins in the English countryside. In 2025, another metal detector discovered a gold coin dating from the Iron Age in East Yorkshire. Before this, a cache of Viking silver was discovered in North Yorkshire.
But this newly discovered gold coin is not like the others. This piece might just rewrite history, at least a little bit.
What makes this piece a real puzzle is what it depicts: a bearded profile of Saint John the Baptist. Thanks to a Latin inscription, experts are convinced that the coin depicts the Christian saint. But what experts don’t yet understand is why the Vikings, who conquered the English kingdom of East Anglia (where the coin was found) and were not Christians minted or carried a coin with a Christian saint on it. Why would pagans want a coin with a Christian on it?
In an interview with the BBC, numismatics expert Simon Coupland compared the coin to “a child trying to fit a hexagonal object into a square hole.” The play just doesn’t fit into history the way it should, suggesting that we may have some of the history wrong.
Perhaps the pagan Vikings liked to wear pendants depicting Christian saints as a way of assimilating with the predominantly Christian population of East Anglia? Or perhaps an East Anglian Christian wore the pendant? Or perhaps a Christian Viking wore the pendant, even though most historians believed the Danish invaders were pagans and not Christians?
And just like that, a small gold coin can turn history upside down by rewriting the cultural landscape of England during the island’s perilous 9th century.
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